3. Install from a PPA (personal packaging archive) or community packages (for openSUSE) or AUR (here arch linux is rolling distribution and does not require waiting if it is not unusual software which is in main repository)

Obviously, it is the third way which is the most easiest and attractive

I am happily using the 3rd step and I am using the latest softwares I love.

To install latest version of nvidia/ati/intel drivers PPA, sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates && sudo apt-get update and upgraded my graphics drivers (nvidia 256.35 I got now instead of old version which is there in default updates)

The above are just some three softwares I am quoting here, there are another 30 thousand s/w in ubuntu PPA to be searched and to be installed in your computer. To know how to search PPA, follow this ubuntugeek article

Sunday, July 18, 2010

I have often wondered how easy it is to set a group of wallpapers in Windows 7 with a time duration. It is time I did the same in Ubuntu and know it is already there.

I know there are two software which do the task of rotating wallpapers available from synaptic. They are drapes and wally

drapes has dependency on mono (which some will not want to)wally pulls the entire kdebase-runtime as its dependency (which I obviously does not want)

The following method uses gnome feature to accept xml file to change/rotate images without installing any of the above packages.

Here is a small howto of what I did to change the backgrounds based on interval step by step

Step 1: Create a directory and copy your images

Step 2: Goto terminal

Step 3: Change to the directory which contains your group of images which needs to be rotated based on interval. Change following script line INTERVAL=20 to desired interval (interval value in seconds) and paste it. If you just paste it, it will create a xml file called bg.xml with 20 seconds as interval between switching to next image

Friday, July 16, 2010

openSUSE 11.3 KDE live CD gave me a pleasant surprise. After downloading openSUSE 11.3 KDE live CD I booted into the live mode. The integration of firefox in openSUSE gives such a feel, that firefox is a native KDE application, such a clean integration of native KDE theme

If you are new to openSUSE and lazy to browse through enormous help and wiki of openSUSE to get links to install multimedia, flash, drivers, just read comments section for knowing more about making openSUSE boot from USB, multimedia repository links and how to install flash plugin, may or may not be useful

I transferred openSUSE 11.3 iso to my USB drive using dd command for testing the live CD version. After testing once and rebooting, it gave me another surprise by storing all the modifications I did to session including network settings.

openSUSE 11.3 64 bit comes with a preemptive 1000Hz kernel. The feel of openSUSE 11.3 KDE version is as good as Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 running gnome

Saturday, July 3, 2010

Fedora is one of the most advanced operating system, which never fails to awe each and every day. I always have wondered how Fedora manages to be so much snappier than Ubuntu. Here may be one of the reasons, it has prelink enabled by default.

Here I try to explain how to get prelink running in Ubuntu for your reading pleasure

Here is a screenshot showing, Fedora 13 has prelink installed and enabled by default, whereas, Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 has not installed prelink by default

prelink is a utility which modifies shared libraries to relocate faster or in end user's terms, launch applications faster

To enable prelink in ubuntu, we have to install it first

sudo aptitude install prelink

Before running prelink first time, we need to modify its config file to enable prelink on all libraries

To do that, the following editor command will help (if you dont want to undergo the pain of opening a file and editing it)

Thursday, July 1, 2010

When we friends were discussing about mp3 players like winamp, windows media player he shocked all of us by telling he used/uses mpg123 from command line to play his mp3 songs

Do you wish to play mp3 from command line like him? Read further if you have ubuntu or fedora( if you are an Arch user, you are most probably a geek and most probably a linux guru and I won't be teaching you how to do "sudo pacman -S mpg123" from command line)

So, to install this commandline mp3 player in Ubuntu

sudo aptitude install mpg123

If you have Fedora, then in Fedora commandline (remove sudo from command, if you are a super user)